Blog

Chatbots: the Travel Agent’s Best Friend

Travel agents ask, or are asked, the
same few questions millions of times per year, making them the ideal
business to be transformed by a chatbot. Let it do the “beach or
touring, snow or city break” questions and save your efforts for
the key interactions with your customers.

The travel
industry remains a cutthroat business with more holiday
firms, airlines and hotels hit by closures in recent
times due to global uncertainty, high fuel costs and a growth in
staycations. Whatever your travel business, from niche boutique
startup to growing brand, chatbots provide a key opportunity to
expand your operations at minimal cost, and to rein in other
expenses.

Among all the industry chaos, there are
still plenty of booming travel firms, running their own types of
niche vacation, so running your own travel agency is still an
achievable goal, and the chatbot can help play a key role in winning
sales and customers. At the basic level, a chatbot can reduce or
remove the need for extra staff, allowing you to run a web-based
operation with no expensive offices.

Chatbots on holiday

Chatbots can answer that endless list
of frequently asked questions, and through a few simple choices
direct people to the holidays/deals they want, be it on a beach for
the family, or a trek with llamas in South America, followed by
swimming with piglets in the Caribbean. Bots help bring customisation
and flexibility in minutes that would take someone wading through
traditional brochures hours, or an endless circle of indecision.

The chatbot in the travel industry is already a common sight, market giant TUI trialed one following recent research showing 77% of people thought a virtual agent would be useful when searching for a holiday, and bots are popular with airlines and hotels to deal with high volumes of interactions. But, your virtual assistant travel agent can be as personal and as flexible as you like, helping win over customers one at a time, or getting messages out to a wider audience 24/7, depending on your needs.

Chatbots connect your travel agency to
the customer instantly, no waiting on hold or for an advisor in a
branch. Using an app or website, you can promote your tours quickly
and efficiently, skipping on the costly advertising where your
opportunity to be seen is dwarfed by established players.

Using strong keywords and SEO,
customers will find you through search and can find the holiday or
tour they want almost instantly. Booking chatbots can speeding up the
booking process and helping upsell extra tours, car rental, spa days
or other add-ons without the sales pressure that human agents feel
the need to apply.

Building the package
with a chatbot

Even if you don’t have direct tours
or holidays to sell, many people are building travel businesses using
existing features and services of the market. The huge brands like
Expedia and Lastminute were built on finding existing flights, hotels
and tours and bundling them into packages that were cheaper.

Creating your business as a travel
planner or booking agent, a chatbot can still help grow the company
by providing links to back-end flight searches through Skyscanner or
other services, hotel bookings, car rentals and other services to
build a customer’s ideal holiday out of the component parts.

Bots can also offer web check-in,
travel support and tie in with existing airline bots for current
information. That chatbot data is also valuable information, helping
find out where people want to go, and plan to visit in future, so you
can create future offers based around customer desire and trends.

Providing the personal touch

Saving cash on staff and offices is a
useful feature of chatbots, but they still cost money to develop into
smart and useful services that people want to interact with. Some
brands have spent millions developing the more advanced bots, but
they can still be developed by individuals or small teams to deliver
the right service your customers need.

You can still imbue the bot with your
own sense of personality and provide that personal touch when needed,
through online chat or over the phone when needed. But, for most
travel agents, the aim is to win bookings through the maximum amount
of automation including the final sale to get bums on airplane seats
or on deckchairs, and chatbots are leading the way in terms of
availability, accessibility and with a growing number of features.

Your bot might start out only
showing the highlights, including photos, video and weblinks
(chatbots are far from just text these days) that your travel agent
offers. But they can easily be boosted to offer package selection,
booking dates and taking payments to make the process faster and
smoother, especially for those in the impulsive weekend or city break
markets.

The chatbot can be used on your own
website, a mobile app, on Facebook Messenger where millions of
potential customers are already present. And, as the business grows,
the bot can handle the volume, whatever the next popular destination
and be updated with sales and bargains, or up and coming events to
help drive repeat business and grow a loyal customer base that is
happy to deal with you and your bot.

Combine cloud-based chatbots with easy
to build websites, endless cloud power and social media to deliver
messages to customers or prospects and you have the features to
deliver a great travel agent, be it one pushing a bespoke and niche
holiday or event, or one that is simply providing a fast service to
get people where they want to go.

Soon, all travel
agents will be largely automated, but yours can still
stand out by focusing on local customers who want to go far, or a
global customer base, bringing them to your area. Offering
differentiation by the type of package or finding the little extras
that major players might miss out on, there is plenty of opportunity.

Chris Knight writes about where technology will take us next, from the power of neural networks, artificial intelligence and chatbots, to the endless worlds promised by augmented and virtual reality. From the latest in gadgets and hardware to how digital businesses can use technology to grow, Chris makes the future clear and understandable to all.

Continue Reading

Chris Knight writes about where technology will take us next, from the power of neural networks, artificial intelligence and chatbots, to the endless worlds promised by augmented and virtual reality. From the latest in gadgets and hardware to how digital businesses can use technology to grow, Chris makes the future clear and understandable to all.

Social Media

Write for Us

The Chatbot is an open and inclusive magazine. If you have an interesting experience to share or a view on the subjects we cover and if you write well, then we are very willing to post your feature.

Just make sure you tick all these boxes:

Your feature should be between 1500 and 2,000 words in length.

It must be original (i.e. your own work and not previously published elsewhere).

The article can contain up to five relevant links as references. If you want a link back to a company you are associated with, you may do so once and if it doesn’t make sense for that link to be in the body of the feature, you can place it with your signature.

We are much more interested in thoughtful pieces that inform or stimulate discussion than overt advertising.

Join the Community

Welcome to the magazine for everyone interested in the future of communications.

As part of the community, you’ll get the chance to shape the magazine. Our front page is informed by the number of upvotes the various features get from registered users. And as a member of the community, you can leave comments.

Also, if you would like our latest content delivered straight to your inbox or content filtered by subject, then just click below. Community membership is free and always will be.

This site uses functional cookies and external scripts to improve your experience.

Privacy Settings

This site uses functional cookies and external scripts to improve your experience. Which cookies and scripts are used and how they impact your visit is specified on the left. You may change your settings at any time. Your choices will not impact your visit.

NOTE: These settings will only apply to the browser and device you are currently using.

Google Analytics

This website uses Google Analytics, a web analytics service provided by Google, Inc. (“Google”). Google Analytics uses “cookies”, which are text files placed on your computer, to help the website analyze how users use the site. The information generated by the cookie about your use of the website (including your IP address) will be transmitted to and stored by Google on servers in the United States. In case of activation of the IP anonymization, Google will truncate/anonymize the last octet of the IP address for Member States of the European Union as well as for other parties to the Agreement on the European Economic Area. Only in exceptional cases, the full IP address is sent to and shortened by Google servers in the USA. On behalf of the website provider Google will use this information for the purpose of evaluating your use of the website, compiling reports on website activity for website operators and providing other services relating to website activity and internet usage to the website provider. Google will not associate your IP address with any other data held by Google. You may refuse the use of cookies by selecting the appropriate settings on your browser. However, please note that if you do this, you may not be able to use the full functionality of this website. Furthermore you can prevent Google’s collection and use of data (cookies and IP address) by downloading and installing the browser plug-in available under https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout?hl=en-GB.